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9 Drawbar Organ

I'm just getting into the Hammond B-3 sound and I was really impressed with the 9 Layer Organ that Jimmyjames posted back in July. I started looking into the way the drawbars worked and found some pretty good pages on the net that have some of the more popular registrations. Unfortunately, you need 9 drawbars to do that and the way they were tied together in the 9 Layer Organ didn't allow you to adjust all of them independently. So, I wanted to build something that would allow me to experiment. This really won't be a performance Stage Setting as much as a "play around with" Stage Setting that you can then solidify into different presets as you find them.
I really think that the key to pulling off a B-3 sound will be in presets because there aren't 30-some-odd drawbars on the PX-5S, for good reason! Here are some of the key notes you'll need to be aware of for this stage setting:
Drawbars: There are nine "drawbars". On the Hammond, they are organized this way: 16' 5 1/3' 8' 4' 2 2/3' 2' 1 3/5' 1 1/3' and 1'. They are on the PX-5S as follows, respectively: ModWheel, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, K1, K2.
Rotary effect: I like being able to experiment with these effects, so I moved them to K3.
K4: This controls the volume of the percussion. More on that below.
Pedal 1: This switches between 2nd percussion/slow decay and 3rd percussion/fast decay. I didn't think the 3rd harmonic sounded very nice when it suspended for too long, but you can adjust that as you like by editing the Stage Setting parameters.
Pedal 2: This turns the percussion on and off.
Percussion: I don't have a Hammond B-3 to sit next to, but I do have the internet! I found a good YouTube video in which some of the different sounds and registrations were isolated:
. With the laptop plugged into the audio in port of the PX-5S (good thinking, Casio!) I played this video through the same speaker as the keyboard. True to some of the other articles I read, the percussion sounded quite marimba-like, so that's on the percussion channel (zone 3).The way the original organs were built, percussion only happened for the first note struck in a legato passage, i.e. as long as any keys were held down, no more percussion sounded. To duplicate this effect, I created a phrase that plays one single note, and then dummy-fill (with expression controller values) to extend the phrase for awhile. Percussion will repeat if you hold down a note long enough, but at a tempo of 20, it hadn't repeated after 2 minutes of sounding a note. I think that'll do. If you want to bypass this effect and have percussion strike every note, regardless of other keys held down, simply turn off the arpeggio button. You will also need the OrganPercuss phrase file in slot 910 for this feature to work.

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Updated May 2, 2014

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